5 common teaching methods may do more harm than good

SEEING THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES – PROJECT FOLLOW THROUGH
These five common reading methods may actually do more harm than good.

Have you ever heard of Project Follow Through (PFT)? Probably not. For almost 30 years (1967-1995), educrats experimented on U.S. kids in over 200 schools nationwide, with 22 different learning/teaching models. The idea was to create the Great Society with educational excellence. The opposite happened. The effects of PFT are still ongoing today, unfortunately.

After the results were analyzed, only one model of teaching proved to work – the direct instruction model using phonics. 

All the other models, whole language (sight-reading), child-led learning, inquiry-led learning, discovery, self-esteem first, etc., failed to produce positive results, and many even did more damage to children. 

(Ironically, self-esteem models did not produce self-esteem. Achievement in basic skills did. Models that emphasize basic skills produced better results on tests of self-concept than did other models.)

Paradoxically, the method that worked and worked well for all academic subjects, Direct Instruction (with phonics), was developed by an advertising-agent-turned-preschool-expert, a non-university, non-educational, non-PhD, father at home, Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann.

So what happened to the results of this long, expensive study, PFT? They were blocked from being disseminated out to the educational world- the teachers and principals that deal with our children every day. Why? Because 21 teaching models failed (including Whole Language and its many names), and only Direct Instruction proved to work. These results were blocked most likely to advance some university professors’, curriculum organizers’, and textbook publishers’ careers. And what about the politics of egos having to admit that the un-credentialed dad got it right? Never!

As a result, many of our children continue to be led down the path of illiteracy because Mr. Ernest House and Mr. Gene Glass, backed by the Ford Foundation, convinced the Department of Education that it was not beneficial (for whom?) to publish the results of Project Follow Through. Billions of taxpayer dollars created not the Great Society, but a mediocre, declining one instead. It’s ironic that men named Glass & House were “throwing stones” at the only successful method. 

Is your child’s education (and future) safe? Take this simple quiz.

Does your child:

1) Know the letter names, but not their individual letter sounds?
2) Know how to recognize words by sight, but not how to sound them out?
3) Confuse words easily?
4) Confuse letters and numbers?
5) Guess at unknown words?
6) Need pictures to help guess at sentence context?
7) Feel frustrated with reading?

If you said YES to any of these questions, your child may develop induced-dyslexia or fall further and further behind each year. 

Do something NOW to change his/her reading skills from sight-words to true phonics with The Godfrey Method. Give your child the tools to succeed in life!


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